The Reflective Practitioner and Teacher Education: an answer to critics

Abstract

This article is an attempt to answer some of the criticisms of the notion of reflective practice in teacher education. It is argued that in a democratic society personal autonomy is an important ideal of education, including teacher education, and that therefore the notion of reflective practice should have a central place. The relationship between autonomy and the reflective self is clarified with reference to different models of the self. In the light of this, the purpose of teacher education for autonomy is defined in terms of the nature of the committed as well as the reflective aspects of the self. The argument is further illustrated and elaborated by examining Schb'n's attempt to reintellec‐tualize professional practice through an analysis of the reflective practitioner as artist. In addition to facilitating self‐analysis and reflection, teacher education should raise awareness of the need to produce and reproduce the milieu of democratic reform. In conclusion, the role of the disciplines is reviewed as a resource for pursuing the goal of autonomy in teacher education.     

Primary advisory teachers: Their value and their prospects

The article explores the issue of teacher autonomy in relation to its potential for freedom or control. It examines the concept of empowerment as applied to education, arguing that, although it is traditionally cast as a means of achieving autonomy, an alternative approach sees empowerment as part of the disciplinary apparatus of late modern governance. In exploring these issues, the article covers ideas such as critical education, the reflective practitioner and personal effectiveness from the view of teacher autonomy as emancipatory; and self-surveillance, disciplinary regimes and pedagogic identity from the perspective of control. The article concludes that the appeal of teacher autonomy to the profession must be tempered by the recognition that it has the ability to both liberate and deceive.     

Visiting good company: Arendt and the development of the reflective practitioner

ABSTRACT

The importance of the concept of reflective practice within the teaching profession has been stressed heavily in recent decades. How it is enacted and how beginning teachers, in particular, have been encouraged to exercise it remains somewhat unclear, with the risk that it becomes a cursory, ill-informed exercise in self-affirmation rather than a central pillar of professional life. In this paper, Hannah Arendt's thinking on judgement, drawn from her studies of Kant, and particularly her concept of ‘enlarged thought’, are used to suggest a stronger basis for the nature of reflective practice and for the validity of the professional judgement involved. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to what could be involved in making fruitful use of Arendt's concept of judgement in the development of beginning teachers as reflective practitioners.     

Peer coach during field experiences: cultivating teacher candidates’ peer feedback and reflective practices

ABSTRACT

Designing field embedded experiences for teacher candidates poses a unique challenge for large teacher education programs. Field experiences must include working with students, enhanced pedagogical coaching, and interaction within a professional community. Coursework coupled with field work should engage teacher candidates in a process of planning, implementing, analyzing and reflecting, and then modifying future teaching as evidence of reflective practice. Skilled coaching by the university based teacher educator or classroom mentor is one avenue for teaching novice educators how to analyze their classroom experiences. However, in large teacher education programs the ratio of candidates to UBTEs can make adequate coaching impossible. Thus, peer coaching can provide a feasible option for UBTE coaching. The purpose of this article is to describe the peer coaching experiences of teacher candidates and their university based teacher educators during junior level clinical block courses focused on developmentally appropriate practices for students in grades 1-3. Presented are a discussion of reflective practice, a rationale for peer coaching, and the application of peer coaching within three early childhood and elementary courses. Recommendations and challenges of peer coaching in a clinical pre-service teacher education program and implications for further studies are explored in the closing.     

Beyond the ‘good teacher’: guiding pre-service teacher reflections on culturally diverse students

This article explores how reflective practice may be facilitated among pre-service teachers preparing to teach in culturally diverse classrooms. The significance of the mentor teacher’s ability to reveal her/himself as a reflective practitioner in order to promote student reflection is well documented. The article specifically addresses one teacher educator’s approach to offering mentor support with a focus on reflective practices related to cultural diversity. She explores how her ethnographic doctoral study on the classroom participation of adult South Sudanese students in different Australian learning environments has informed her own practice as a teacher, and ways in which her teaching philosophy and values were influenced by the sustained reflection needed to complete the study. By making explicit an aspect of her reflective practice, she aims to add to the growing body of literature on how to engage pre-service teachers meaningfully in reflection on their own classroom practice, especially in relation to teaching to diversity.     

Media and adult learning: A forum: The role of the faculty member in distance education

Abstract

This article argues for understanding distance education as a community of practice that must acknowledge and accommodate diversity in the context of increasing economic globalization. It asserts that any community of practice is embedded in a larger social context that influences values and practice. It also examines the historic and contemporary social, economic, and political forces that inform and influence distance education practice. This is followed by reflections on the implications for distance education practice and its current capacity to be sensitive to diversity and to meet the needs of culturally diverse learners.     

Weaving Together Undergraduate Research, Mentoring of Junior Faculty, and Assessment: The Case of an Interdisciplinary Program

Scholars in teaching and learning value student research and program assessment as strategies to promote excellence in undergraduate education. Yet, in practice, each can be complex and difficult to sustain. This case study demonstrates how undergraduate research, mentoring of junior faculty, and assessment can be integrated in ways that enrich the educational experiences of students and the professional development of faculty and improve research on teaching and learning. The authors describe a lively undergraduate research project that became tied to the mentoring of assistant professors and then to program assessment. We conclude with recommendations for implementing such a project in other academic settings. Elizabeth Thomas is Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and teaches courses on inquiry in the social sciences, community psychology, and psychology and the arts. Her research examines sociocultural contexts for learning and development with a particular focus on the role of the arts and the potential of participatory action research strategies. Diane Gillespie is Professor and Associate Director of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (IAS) at The University of Washington, Bothell, received her Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln in Cultural and Psychological Studies in Education. She teaches multicultural social science courses and qualitative research. Her recent publications explore the importance of narrative for reflective teaching and learning, learning in small groups, and the role of human rights in nonformal education.     

Reflective Classroom Practice: case studies of student teachers at work

Abstract

This paper addresses the nature of reflective classroom practice in a setting where action research has been undertaken by both the student teachers and the teaching practice supervisor. It is based on a cross‐case study of the processes through which student teachers learn to teach. Specifically, the analysis focuses on how student teachers reflect on their experiences in learning to teach. The data are based on student teachers’ reported thoughts about their learning over a period of one year. The results contribute to the understanding of reflective classroom practice by highlighting first student teachers’ perceptions about learning to teach and second their reviews on classroom practice. The discussion also adds to the literature on teacher development taken from the novice‐expert research tradition. Accordingly, implications for curriculum development in teacher education are drawn.     

Foster Children of Economics

Abstract

A case study is presented of a professional development program for environmental education in Australia that applies the principles of participatory research and critical reflection. These two principles are embodied in the concept of reflective practice. Reflective practice involves using ethical and contextual considerations in professional decisionmaking rather than making such decisions on the basis of habit, intuition, impulse, and tradition. The education of “reflective practitioners” of this type is the goal of the Master of Environmental Education program at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. After an introduction to the program and the concept of reflective practice, a case study of the experiences of students in one of the subjects of that program is presented. The case study revealed that students derived a number of benefits from developing their reflective practice skills, including heightened political awareness, a strong sense of influences and limitations of social context on their ideas and environmental education practices, increased self-confidence, and a desire to continue in a reflective practice group. The case study also revealed some of the concerns of the students and staff, especially in the areas of assessment, the fear of personal disclosure, and the need for structured peer support.     

Education for the community?

Abstract

This paper explores the apparently forgotten area of community education. It examines the dominant modes of community education practice, dubbed the status reform model, and concludes that one of the key explanations of its failure to change practice was its reluctance to tackle professional domination of existing power structures in education. The article also examines New Right definitions of appropriate parental roles, of citizenship, and of community. The article concludes by identifying some possible strategies to expand and enhance the roles offered by the education system to lay actors.     

Breaking Free from the Needs Paradigm: A Collaborative Analysis of Inclusion

ABSTRACT

This self-study, based on research, conducted over five years, focuses on my leadership role employing an inclusion model of education in a school in Iceland serving students from ages 6 to 16. In this article, we examine how Edda’s practice helped support inclusion for the students, their families, and the teachers who engage with them. This multilayered self-study research project included feedback and insights from others in order to inform my understanding of my practice within the context of inclusion. Findings reveal Edda’s focus on the discourse of diagnosis as a dominant structural issue within her practice. The resulting themes on perceptions of inclusion, coordination of support, deployment of people, and collaboration across different entities have informed my understanding about my practice and my perspective on the meaning of a support system within inclusive education and improved student performance.     

The President's Greeting

Abstract

Based in an ethnographic project involving three Episcopal Church–affiliated high schools, this article considers how reflective and relational pedagogy influenced students’ personal growth in religious education classes. Students became self-responsible for their spiritual development in the school settings where the practice of “notebooking” (similar to “journaling”) was robustly relational and nurtured emergent personhood. The results of the project suggest that religious educators will benefit from reflecting on the nature and function of relationality, personae, and personhood in religious education praxis.     

The promise of action research for critically reflective teacher education

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of the potential that action research theory and practice hold for educating preservice teachers to become more critically reflective. First, action research theory, especially as it informs current notions of educational research and practice, is reviewed. Then critically reflective teaching is described by grounding the term in critical social science views supportive of the social reconstructionist reform tradition in teacher education. Special attention is given in this review to the claims made by action research advocates regarding the power of action research to promote critically reflective teaching. Finally, to examine the empirical basis for these claims, a brief survey is made of several reports of the use of action research by teacher educators. The analysis reveals cautious optimism for the promise action research holds for critically reflective teacher education.     

Teachers’ cultural autobiography as means of civic professional engagement

Abstract

This article will present my autobiographical journey: from communism to capitalism, from the banking system and the pedagogy of the oppressed to problem-posing education. My personal experiences are seen as a way of emigrating internally and as part of the struggle through the process of self-actualisation and self-understanding. In effect, the practice of intellectual freedom shifts from a personal to a civic perspective. My wish for social justice, especially for children from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds living in a global society, will be considered, with reference to the voluntary work in the Romanian community. Thus, from a postmodern perspective, the autobiographical process is not just about self, but also about the Other.     

Reflective and Reflexive Practice in Initial Teacher Education: a critical case study

Abstract

This article outlines approaches that are being adopted to encourage students training to be teachers on a Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course to reflect upon their teaching. It takes the form of a special case designed to nurture good practice in Teacher Education. Applications for those working in higher education are discussed. A distinction has been made between reflection and reflexivity (Ashmore, 1989; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). It was found that engaging students in reflexivity can have benefits in terms of classroom effectiveness and reflective writing can play an enhancing role in this process. It was found that many students were judged to have exhibited reflexivity in their teaching and in their written work. Ways in which the emphasis on reflective practice has led to the development of classroom skills were identified.     

Research methods as a situated response: Towards a First Nations' methodology

In this paper the author writes in retrospect about her experience of researching the creation of a culture-based curriculum in a tribal community. She is situated in the community as both an insider and an outsider, represented in this article through the use of an academic voice spliced with a narrative voice. Both her research problem and methodology emerged as a response to the community. The methodology she used was inspired by a wide range of cultural and academic traditions. Finally, rather than prescribing a particular formula for research in Native communities, she is suggesting that the model of a ''situated response,'' particular and dependent on context, would ground research in community, as well as academic, concerns.     

Adrift Without a Life Belt: Reflective self-assessment in a post-modern age

Self-assessment is an established aspect of teaching in higher education, informing reflective practice, self-study and continuing professional development, and offering a fundamental method in student-centred approaches to the support of learning. However, reflective self-assessment is often treated uncritically by its proponents, where it is taken for granted as 'a good thing'. Self-assessment is typically grounded in a humanistic-psychological approach that fails to critically investigate its own theories of knowledge, such as the assumed transparent nature of the 'self'. Where many practitioners regard self-assessment as a radical and 'freeing' practice, a post-structuralist critique of the dominant humanistic approach to teaching in higher education exposes self-assessment as a normative and 'disciplining' educational practice, where the self is constituted, not constitutive. An argument is made for an alternative to humanistic models of self-assessment as a self-forming without invoking personal agency.     

“I’m Going to Israel and All I Need to Pack Is My Imagination”: Pretend Trips to Israel in Jewish Early Childhood Education

ABSTRACT

This article examines the practice of pretend Israel trips in Jewish early childhood education. Jewish early childhood educators who work in markedly different preschool settings, and who have differing beliefs about Israel and Israel education, nonetheless converge on a practice of pretend trips to Israel that remains remarkably stable across settings. This article examines how and why these pretend trips have become part of the “grammar” of Jewish early childhood education, illuminating a practice that is simultaneously beloved and unsatisfying for Jewish early childhood educators who care about early childhood education and Israel education.     

EscapeScape: Simulating ecopedagogy for the tourist

ABSTRACT

Environmental education as a theory and practice of ecopedagogical simulation positively acknowledges various accidental happenings in the learner's experience. By working with and on the accidents, the learner is encouraged to imagine the real object that escapes his/her experience and thus cannot be and should not be reduced into human subjectivities. For less anthropocentric environmental education and its research, this article empirically and conceptually develops the ecopedagogy as/in escapeScape—or (e)Scape—via three case studies derived from various experientially educative settings related to tourism.